Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

1001 Lush

Lush

"Oh, this is lovely." Those were the words out of Claire's mouth as she stood at the back door of the bungalow staring into the woods. I honestly could not tell if she was being sincere or sarcastic.

I'm pretty sure she was being sincere and I just wasn't used to it. I looked out and saw it was beginning to snow and then looked back at her and she had a hand on her cheek and a wistful look on her face.

"Let's go for a walk," I said.

"What, in the weather?"

"Yeah. Just a short one. Before it gets too heavy or changes to rain." I put my hoodie on and then pulled my jacket over it. There were some gloves crammed in the pocket.

I didn't really have the right shoes for hiking through the woods. I had the choice between my high tops, which were thin canvas with a flat rubber sole, or a short pair of black leather boots that were honestly not that much taller than the high tops and hadn't aged well. By which I mean they looked very eighties.

But they were probably the slightly better choice for walking through snowy underbrush. I pulled them on. "Are you coming? Or am I going out by myself?"

"Oh, I suppose just for a few minutes," she said. She had a pair of winter boots at least, and a long coat. She already had a scarf around her patchy hair and she wound a woolen one around that and her neck.

She had another one, a black and white checkered scarf with fringe on the ends, that she'd gotten as a Christmas gift. I don't remember who gave it to her, but she wrapped it around my neck and then I pulled up my hood and out we went.

There was a sort of notch in the underbrush that I took to mean a path went through there, and we went that direction. It was early afternoon so it was still light, though a muted light through the snowy clouds. We quickly came to an area of pines or some kind of evergreens which kept the snow off and made for a very clear way underneath them but it meant we lost the path. It took a bit to find it again.

"Where do you suppose it goes?" Claire asked, once we were going through the bare trees again, and the snow was filtering down around us.

"The lake, I hope? There's supposed to be a lake back here."

Any animals that might have lived in that section of woods were either scared of us or hunkered down for the snow. There were no bird calls, no rustles or cries. There were places where the trail thinned down to almost nothing, but we picked our way along.

We came to the lake more suddenly than I expected. It looked like the trail curved to the right as it went up a slight rise, and it did, because if it had gone straight over the rise it would have gone directly into the lake. Down below I could see the rise was really one side of a huge rock that had grown covered with dirt and trees on the side we approached from, but which was pretty bare on the side of the water. We could make our way around it and down to where a flat stone made a kind of outcrop into the water. Ripples lapped up the slope of the rock and as we stood there I could hear the sort of white noise that was made by the snowflakes hitting the surface of the lake.

I was thinking as I looked across the water that it wasn't a very big lake in my estimation and I would have described it as more of a large pond, but what do I know about these things?

Claire cleared her throat. "That's it? The lake?"

"I guess?"

"It's really more of a large pond if you ask me," she said with a sniff and then crossed her arms as I started to laugh. "What is so funny?"